Toy Resale Price Index: What Used Toys Are Worth (2026)

Original research by Toycycle · Data snapshot: August 5, 2026 · Next update: November 2026

A used toy on Toycycle lists for a median 44% of its original retail price. Across every secondhand condition Toycycle stocks, the median is 50%. Those figures come from 1,368 resale listings — used, open-box and overstock — in our live catalog on August 5, 2026. Brand-new inventory is excluded on purpose: this index measures what previously-stocked toys are worth, not how deeply we discount new merchandise.

Key findings

• Used toys hold a median 44% of original retail across 840 used listings in Toycycle's August 2026 catalog. The middle half sits between 34% and 52%.
• Open box holds 70% in the same catalog, a 26-point premium over used. A $50 toy lists for about $35 open-box and about $22 used.
• Across all resale conditions the median is 50% across 1,368 listings — but this is the least stable figure here, because it moves with our stock mix. Cite the condition-specific numbers instead.
• Condition and brand matter about equally. Inside a single brand, moving from open box to used costs 24 points (PlanToys, 71% to 47%). Holding condition constant, best-to-worst brand spread is 22–26 points. Condition is the one a seller still controls.
• Best used-condition retention: Lovevery, 59% of retail (30 used listings) — the highest of any brand with at least 10 used listings in Toycycle's August 2026 catalog, ahead of KiwiCo at 50%.
• Weakest used-condition retention: BabyBjörn at 37% and VTech at 40% — baby gear that gets outgrown and battery-powered toys that get superseded.
• The "wooden toys hold value" story is mostly a condition effect. Wooden-toy brands lead the headline table because their stock is largely open-box. Compared used-to-used, PlanToys (47%) beats VTech (40%) by only 7 points, not 31.
• Open box is the most stable number in the data. It sits at 70% of retail whether a listing went up last month or three years ago. Used moves only slightly with listing age, from 44% across all listings to 46% among those listed in the past year.

Toy resale price index: brand rankings, 2026

Median listing price as a percentage of original retail, for every brand with at least 10 resale listings in Toycycle's live catalog on August 5, 2026. Higher means the brand holds value better. Brand-new stock is excluded throughout.

Read the condition-mix column before comparing brands. A brand stocked mainly as open box will outrank a brand stocked mainly as used even if the two depreciate identically. The used-only table below is the like-for-like comparison.

The spread in that table is largely condition mix, not durability. For a like-for-like comparison, see the used-only table below.

How much are used toys worth compared with retail?

Across 840 strictly used listings in Toycycle's August 2026 resale catalog, the median asking price is 44% of original retail. A toy that sold new for $50 typically lists secondhand on Toycycle for about $22, and one that sold for $100 lists for about $44.

Medians hide the spread, so here is the full picture by condition. The 25th–75th percentile range shows where the middle half of listings actually sit.

Value retention by condition — Toycycle catalog, August 2026 (new stock excluded)

Condition	Median % of retail	Middle 50% range	What a $50 toy lists for
Open box	70%	63–73%	$35
Overstock	66%	60–70%	$33
Used	44%	34–52%	$22
All resale listings	50%	40–70%	$25

If you are setting a price on your own items, our guide to pricing toys and baby gear for resale walks through how to turn these benchmarks into an asking price.

Are open-box toys worth it?

On price, yes — and this dataset puts a number on it. Open-box toys list at a median 70% of original retail in Toycycle's August 2026 index, so the typical open-box listing saves you 30% off the new price on an item that is complete and unplayed-with. The middle half of open-box listings falls between 63% and 73% of retail. That band looks tight, but it is worth knowing why: open-box stock is concentrated in a few wholesale brand lines. Half of all 498 open-box listings (250) are PlanToys, and another 43 are Loog. Strip PlanToys out and the median barely moves — 69% across the remaining 248 listings — but the spread widens to 55–72%. The central number is robust; the apparent tightness is largely one brand's pricing.

The 26-point gap between open box (70%) and used (44%) is the widest condition step in the data, and it holds up inside individual brands too — PlanToys stock moves from 71% open-box to 47% used, a 24-point step with the brand held constant. For buyers, open box is where the discount and the condition are best balanced. For sellers, it is the most valuable label you can honestly claim: an unopened or complete-in-box item listed as "used" gives away roughly a quarter of its retail value. If you are new to the category, our explainer on what open box means and whether you should buy it covers what to inspect before you commit.

Which toy brands hold their value best?

To compare brands fairly you have to hold condition constant. This table covers every brand with at least 10 strictly used listings — no open-box or overstock stock mixed in.

Used-condition value retention by brand — brands with 10+ used listings (August 2026)

Brand	Median used listing price vs. retail
Lovevery	59%
KiwiCo	50%
JellyCat	47%
PlanToys	47%
Melissa & Doug	46%
Fisher-Price	45%
Hape	45%
American Girl	44%
Skip Hop	44%
VTech	40%
BabyBjörn	37%

Among brands with at least 10 used-condition listings, Lovevery holds value best at a median 59% of retail in Toycycle's August 2026 catalog — a full 9 points above second-place KiwiCo at 50%. Both are staged developmental systems sold primarily by subscription, and both retire kit versions as their curriculum changes. Buyers who want a single stage, or who come in part-way through, appear to make up a meaningful share of secondhand demand. Nothing else in the table breaks away: seven of the eleven brands sit between 44% and 47%, which is the real story of used toy pricing. For most brands, used is used, and the number is somewhere near 45% of retail.

Which toys lose their value fastest?

What this section can and cannot show. Every listing here is observed once, on one day, against a fixed retail anchor. That measures where a price sits, not how fast it fell to get there — this index cannot produce a depreciation rate or curve. What follows is about which brands sit lowest, and why we think that is.

Two distinct failure modes sit at the bottom of the table, and they are worth separating.

Outgrown baby gear. BabyBjörn is the weakest brand in Toycycle's 2026 Toy Resale Price Index, at a median 37% of retail across 14 used listings. Its usable windows are short by durable-goods standards, though they vary by product: BabyBjörn rates the Mini carrier for 0–6 months, the Bliss bouncer from birth to around two years, and the Harmony carrier to age three. Even the longest of those is outgrown well before a wooden toy is, and families reach the end of the window at roughly the same point in a child's life.

Battery-powered and electronic toys. VTech, the only pure-electronics brand with enough used listings to rank, sits at 40%. That is what toy-sustainability research would predict: a Nottingham Trent University analysis of what makes children's toys last found that battery-dependent toys have short useful lives and limited value in secondhand sales, while wooden toys "retain relatively high secondhand values." Our catalog shows the same ordering, though at a smaller gap than the headline table implies.

One correction worth making to the conventional wisdom: the headline table appears to show wooden-toy brands beating electronics by thirty-one points, but almost all of that gap is condition mix, not durability. PlanToys tops the table because 250 of its 265 listings are open box. Compared used-to-used, PlanToys retains 47% and VTech 40% — a real advantage for wood, but a 7-point one (Toycycle catalog, August 2026).

Does condition or brand matter more?

Both, by almost the same amount — which is not the answer the headline table appears to give.

The cleanest available way to size the condition effect is to measure it inside a single brand, which removes brand as a variable — though not product mix. PlanToys stock listed as open box holds 71% of retail while PlanToys stock listed as used holds 47%: a 24-point step within one brand. The used side of that comparison is only 15 listings and is not a matched set of the same products, so treat it as indicative rather than precisely measured. American Girl shows the same pattern at a smaller scale, 62% open box against 44% used, an 18-point step.

Brand matters about as much once condition is held constant. Among brands with at least ten used listings the spread is 22 points, from Lovevery at 59% to BabyBjörn at 37%. Among brands with at least ten open-box listings it is 26 points, from PlanToys and Loog at 71% down to Tytan Tiles at 45% — a brand stocked entirely as open box that still prices 25 points below the open-box median. Good condition does not rescue a weak brand.

So the practical hierarchy is not that condition beats brand. It is that the two move price by a similar amount, and condition is the only one of the two a seller still controls at the moment of listing. Keeping the box, the manual and the original parts is worth roughly as much to your final price as having bought a premium brand in the first place.

How should you price used toys to sell?

Start from the benchmark for the condition, then adjust for brand:

• Open box, complete in packaging: start near 70% of original retail.
• Used, good condition: start near 44% of original retail — the middle half of the market sits between 34% and 52%.
• Premium developmental brands (Lovevery, KiwiCo): support 50–59%.
• Electronics and outgrown baby gear (VTech, BabyBjörn): expect 37–40%.

Be accurate about condition rather than optimistic. Overstating it is the fastest way to a return, and understating it costs you around a quarter of the item's retail value. If you would rather not price and list items yourself, Toycycle's consignment program prices against these same catalog benchmarks. For the wider market context behind this index — toy market size, secondhand growth rates, and returns data — see our toy industry statistics page, updated on the same cycle.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of retail do used toys sell for?

Used toys list at a median 44% of their original retail price, based on 840 used listings in Toycycle's catalog in August 2026. The middle half of used listings falls between 34% and 52% of retail. Across all resale conditions — used, open box and overstock — the median is 50%. These are asking prices on a curated resale marketplace rather than completed sale prices.

Which toy brand holds its value best?

Compared at the same condition, Lovevery holds its value best: used Lovevery items list at a median 59% of original retail across 30 listings. KiwiCo is second at 50%. Most other brands cluster between 44% and 47%.

How much cheaper are open-box toys than new?

About 30% cheaper. Open-box toys list at a median 70% of original retail, with the middle half of listings between 63% and 73%.

Does condition or brand matter more for resale value?

They matter about equally. Within a single brand, moving from open box to used costs 24 percentage points of retail value (PlanToys: 71% to 47%). Holding condition constant, the gap between the best and worst brand is 22 to 26 points. The difference is that condition is the variable a seller still controls when listing.

Which toys lose value fastest?

Outgrown baby gear and battery-powered toys. BabyBjörn listings sit at 37% of retail and VTech listings at 40% — the two lowest brand figures in the index.

Why does this index exclude brand-new toys?

Because including them measures our discounting policy rather than resale value. New, never-owned inventory listed below MSRP reflects a retail markdown decision, not what the secondhand market pays. Excluding it — 449 listings — is what makes this a resale index.

Methodology

Source and date

A single-day snapshot of Toycycle's live Shopify catalog taken August 5, 2026, comprising 6,170 products. Listings in the catalog were created between August 20, 2022 and August 4, 2026. Prices are current asking prices on the snapshot date. Toycycle is a United States marketplace and all prices and percentages here are US dollars against US retail pricing; the index should not be read as a guide to resale values in other markets.

Exclusions

From 6,170 products we removed 303 inactive (draft) listings; 1,125 gift cards, bundles, and consignment or shipping-fee SKUs identified by title; and 2,850 listings with no valid original-retail anchor. That leaves 1,892 usable listings, from which we excluded 449 listings tagged New and 75 listings carrying no condition tag, giving a resale universe of 1,368 listings whose condition is known.

Metric

Value retention = listing price ÷ the listing's original retail price, taken from the Shopify "compare at" field. That reference price is recorded by Toycycle staff when an item is listed; it is not drawn from a live manufacturer price feed and is not independently audited, so it should be read as a self-reported reference price rather than a verified MSRP. It is computed per variant, requiring a retail anchor above zero and a listing price no more than 110% of that anchor. Multi-variant products contribute their own median once, so a product with 20 variants does not outweigh a product with one. Brand figures are the median across a brand's listings, rounded to the nearest whole percent. Percentile ranges are the 25th and 75th percentiles of the same distributions.

Brand assignment

Brand is the catalog vendor field, with duplicate spellings merged (PlanToys USA → PlanToys; Loog Guitars → Loog; BabyBjorn → BabyBjörn). House-label listings under generic vendor names (94 resale listings, median 42%) are counted in the overall and condition figures but excluded from the brand tables, because they are not a brand.

Condition tags

Taken from Toycycle's product condition tags — Used, Open Box, Overstock and New, including badge-prefixed variants. Where a listing carried more than one condition tag, the most conservative label was applied. A further 75 listings carried no condition tag at all and are excluded entirely: an untagged listing has no known condition, so it cannot belong in a condition-based index. The three condition groups therefore account for all 1,368 listings.

Why overstock is included but new stock is not

Overstock is unsold retail stock, so like new inventory it has never been owned. We include it because it reaches buyers through the secondhand channel and is priced against that channel, whereas our brand-new stock is priced by ordinary retail markdown. It is a small and deliberately transparent judgement call: overstock is 30 listings, 2% of the index, and removing it entirely leaves the headline figure unchanged at 50% and every brand ranking intact. All 30 were added to the catalog since July 2025, so overstock is a recent addition rather than a long-standing category.

Sample gates

A brand appears in the main table only with at least 10 resale listings, and in the used-only table only with at least 10 strictly used listings. Fifteen brands clear the first gate and eleven clear the second. Those fifteen account for 588 of the 1,368 resale listings (43%); the rest sit with brands below the threshold, whose pooled median is 45%, plus the house-label stock described above. Sample size and condition mix are shown for every brand in the main table above; used-listing counts behind the used-only table range from 10 (Skip Hop) to 36 (Melissa & Doug), with Lovevery’s leading figure resting on 30. Brands with large catalogs but few retail anchors — notably Tender Leaf, Wee Gallery and HABA — do not appear at any threshold.

Robustness check: does listing age change the answer?

This is a single-day snapshot, and older listings dominate it — the median listing in the index went up 798 days before the snapshot date. If prices behaved differently in earlier years, that alone could skew the result, so we tested it directly by re-running every figure on progressively more recent listings.

Open box is unchanged at 70% under every cut, and used moves only from 44% to between 45% and 47%. The two condition figures we recommend citing are therefore stable against listing age. The all-conditions figure is not: it rises from 50% to 56% on recent listings, because recent stock contains proportionally less used inventory. That is the same stock-mix sensitivity described below, and another reason to cite the condition-specific numbers instead.

Limitations

Four are worth stating plainly.

• These are asking prices, not sale prices. They come from a single curated marketplace, not the market as a whole. Toycycle screens stock for quality and completeness, so these figures likely run above open peer-to-peer marketplaces and below full retail replacement cost.
• A few brands dominate parts of the index. PlanToys alone is 19% of all resale listings and 50% of open-box listings; the fifteen ranked brands together cover 588 of 1,368 listings (43%). Condition-level figures are therefore weighted toward whatever we stock deeply, and the open-box figure in particular reflects a small number of wholesale brand lines.
• Only listings with a recorded retail anchor can be measured. After the filters above, 1,892 of 4,742 eligible listings — 40% — carried an original-retail price to compare against. Anchored listings skew toward recognisable branded stock, so the index describes that segment better than it describes one-off or unbranded items.
• The all-conditions figure depends on our stock mix. Used listings are 61% of the resale universe, which pulls the 50% headline down toward the used number. If our mix shifted toward open box the headline would rise without any change in the market. The condition-specific figures — 44% used, 70% open box — are the stable ones and the ones worth citing.

Sample sizes at the brand level are also small; a 2-point difference between two adjacent brands is not meaningful.

How to cite this page

These figures are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, so they are free to cite, quote and republish — including commercially — with attribution and a link. Suggested citation:

Toycycle. "Toy Resale Price Index: What Used Toys Are Worth (2026)." Toycycle, August 2026. https://toycycle.co/pages/toy-resale-price-index

How this index compares with other published work

The closest comparable work is GoodBuy Gear's annual Baby & Kid Resale Report, which takes a similar approach — condition-tiered analysis of a resale marketplace's own catalog — at far larger scale, covering more than 70,000 items across 2,600 brands in its 2025 edition, and across baby and kid gear generally rather than toys specifically. Rebelstork (now REBEL) publishes a Baby Durables Resale Report, and ThredUp's annual Resale Report covers apparel; both are closer to market sizing than to value retention.

We are not aware of a published benchmark specifically for used-toy value retention against original retail, which is the gap this index tries to fill — and we would welcome comparison against GoodBuy Gear's figures wherever the categories overlap. Every number on this page comes from our own catalog unless a third party is named alongside it.

About the data. Toycycle is a curated secondhand children's toy and baby gear marketplace, founded in 2019 by Rhonda Collins and Sarfraz Arshad, selling used, open-box and overstock inventory online across the United States. The dataset behind this index covers catalog listings created from August 2022 onward, when our current catalog system was adopted; it is not the full trading history of the business. This index is compiled directly from our own catalog records rather than from survey data or third-party estimates, which is both its strength — every figure traces to a real listing — and its limitation, described above. It is refreshed quarterly; the next edition is due November 2026. Questions about the methodology or requests for the underlying aggregate data can be sent through our contact page.

Last updated: August 7, 2026. Data snapshot unchanged: August 5, 2026.